MOOved: Underground Dilettante Goes to the MOO Meetup

Last night’s Moo Meetup — celebrating the tiny little photo cards ubiquitous amongst web 2.0ers — was all aflickr with camera flashes. (Seriously, go look up “moo party” on flickr.com — there are already over 700 shots posted as of this writing.) I’m guessing that we were asymptotically approaching 1:2 ratios of humans to CCDs at these events, if you take phonecams into consideration.

If you don’t know what a Moo Minicard is, you will soon. They’re cute little half-sized business cards that you can emblazon cheaply with images from your Flickr, Habbo, Second Life, etc account.

The whole Moo crew jetted in from London to throw down at 111 Minna, ground zero for tech parties. Amidst popping balloons and flashes, I met founder Richard Moross and CTO/DJ Stefan Magdalinski. We swapped cards and talked about my favorite Moo topic: are these little buggers being used as pick up cards? (My deepthroating, er, anonymous, tipster from the gay underground tells me that a Moo card sure does make a great leave behind with the right hottie. And a pro bondage rigger tells me that he prints his own kinky photo cards, but maybe he’ll switch over to Moo.)

Moross blushes at the topic and tells me that a UK act of 1984 makes it illegal to print obscene images without a porn license (MOO doesn’t have one.) Not all customers are up on their British obscenity codes, so the company has had pull a dramatic photo or two. (Let’s just say that the cards’ aspect ratio favors length over girth.)

Stef’s very English about it. “We definitely see the most, um, liberal interpretations of dating that you could find on a card. People are definitely using them as pick-up cards.”

After hot self-portraiture and Second Life/World of Warcraft avatars (guilty!), another popular Moo card subject is Burning Man. I had a nice chat about this with Michael Michael at the bar, who exclaimed, “All my worlds are merging! Cacophony, Burning Man, Silicon Valley!”

Generous with smiles and stories, he was decidedly bereft of Moo cards. He blames Yahoo, Flickr’s new corporate parent. “I’m having so much fun doing all this s- but I can’t get my Moo cards because Yahoo has f- up and locked me out of all my stuff!”

M2’s partner, Dusty Ranger, was laying low without a lens: “I’m not a photographer…Apparently, though, if you’re a Linden or a Burner or a Flickr person, you’re here!”

I talked to a lot of Flickr people, many of whom were exhibiting some of their hottest Moo cards at the gallery. Lane Hartwell, shooter for TODO, is shooting me shooting the Moo cards. Oculist, an Academy of Art student in directing and cinematography, tells me “These cards are like tiny IMAXes. I always think in wide screen — no one thinks in a square!”

Cindy Loughridge shoots “just for fun.” Or at least she used to. Her everyday scenes and family portraiture have so caught the fancy of the Flickr community that her photo career has taken flight unexpectedly. Her husband Paul is making tens of thousands of dollars in a surprise second career. His photos of art robots — recycled products bolted together — took in over 120,000 hits last year.

“I just put myself up there. Some people write in and say, ‘Dude that’s cool.’ But some people write in and say, ‘Dude that’s cool, what does it cost?'”

At this point I had Moo cards falling out of all my pockets. Rennie Lum of Nature.com and I grabbed our extra-dorky goodie bags (disposable Lomolito cameras and Moo Minicard holders!) and headed off into the balmy night. Special thanks to security crewmember Gonzo who both correctly IDed my Vespa as an ’81 and wished me a safe ride home. Shoulda asked him for a photo.

Underground DilettanteSarah Lefton has changed careers more times that you’ve changed your underwear this week, but has kept up a strong motif of abject dorkiness. Somewhere between helping start a half-dozen Internet companies, designing some infamous t-shirts, running a Jewish summer camp and teaching web design to thousands of starry-eyed career changers, she officially Saw It All. Riding her trusty, rusty Vespa from geeky event to event, you can count on her to deliver the straight dope about the bad belly dancing, great passed hors d’ouevres and adorable nerds that keep the San Francisco underbelly worth tickling. (Mmm, underbelly.)